Emerging more than five years after her debut album Ctrl (and three years later than it was first announced) it’s been a long, odd wait for SZA’s second album SOS – to the point that over the past couple of years SZA seemed to even have a vague public spat online with Top Dawg record label boss Punch about getting it out there.
That’s a bad sign, right? Within forty-five seconds the first thought about this excellent album is the same as the concluding thought will be, an hour later: Solána Imani Rowe is a world class talent – one of the very best – and she’s not getting good enough service. Quite apart from all the horrible exes and bad shags and treacherous frenemies strewn across the songs, in real life SZA’s not being protected well enough by the business folks around her. And maybe the insecurity of that corporate failure is starting to poke through the surface of some otherwise phenomenal music.
